A Mammoth Extinction

When they're not starring in mediocre movies like 10,000 B.C. and Ice Age, woolly mammoths are a subject of intense interest among paleontologists--who are every bit as curious about why they died out as in how they lived.

Now, a new study has confirmed what everybody pretty much suspected: the mammoths were wiped out by a combination of global warming (which eroded their habitats toward the end of the Ice Age) and human hunters. The last mammoths alive 6,000 years ago occupied one-tenth of the territory inhabited by the species 42,000 years ago; at the same time, humans began encroaching on their territory, as well as picking off stray mammoths that wandered far from home.

Oddly enough, the researchers say, a spurt of global warming 126,000 years ago shrunk the mammoths' territory even more severely than the one 6,000 years ago--but they managed to survive because not enough humans were around to hunt them.